


Cooperative Gameplay

by strix_alba



Series: after the (radioactive) dust settles [1]
Category: Stranger Things (TV 2016)
Genre: Gen, Post-Season/Series 02
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-12-20
Updated: 2017-12-20
Packaged: 2019-02-14 00:35:09
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,806
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12995952
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/strix_alba/pseuds/strix_alba
Summary: Max always looks at Jane like she is expecting something from her, even though they aren’t friends. Jane doesn’t know what to do with that.





	Cooperative Gameplay

Jane is doing math practice at 3:27 five days after the Snow Ball when there is a knock on the front door. She drops the pencil. It isn’t the secret knock that her friends use. Her skin goes hot and clammy at the same time, even though she knows she’s safer now than she has ever been in her life. She walks silently to the door and opens it as far as the chain will allow. She stays back a little ways, like her sister told her, just in case the person on the other side of the door has a knife.

Outside, there is a face at head height, surrounded by long orange hair and a blue cap, the soft kind for wearing in the cold: Max, with her eyebrows raised and a half-smile on her face. “Hi,” she says.

Jane stares at her. She’s never come to visit by herself before. Why should she? They’re not friends.

“Um, can I come in?” says Max.

“Why?” Jane asks.

Max looks startled. Her eyebrows jump. “It’s freezing out.”

“No. Why are you here?” Jane clarifies.

“Because I want to hang out with you? Look, I brought a game.” Max holds up a box in hands that have finger-socks on them. The box has pictures and words in bright colors. The letters are hard to read.

The only game that Jane knows is the one with the board and the little statues at Mike’s house. She doesn’t know what she’s supposed to say about this game, so she watches and waits to see what will happen.

What happens: Max rolls her eyes and huffs. A soft white cloud forms in front of her mouth, and then disappears. “Can you please let me in? We don’t have to play the stupid game, okay? I won’t even stay. I just gotta use the bathroom.”

If Jane doesn’t let her in, then Max will have to walk out in the cold for a long time before she gets home. Jane decides that she doesn’t care for the idea of Max being that uncomfortable when there is no reason for her to be. She slides back the latch.

Max rushes inside and pushes the door shut with her shoulder. She stomps snow off of her boots. She looks around the house with her mouth half-open. Jane sees her gaze catch on the boarded-up windows, the radio transmitter, the table with her workbook. “Thanks,” says Max.

“Follow me,” says Jane, once Max has taken off her finger-socks. She shows her the bathroom. Then she sits back down at the table. She picks up her pencil so she will look busy when Max comes back. If she’s busy, Max will leave.

The bathroom door opens. Footsteps thunk towards her. Jane stares hard at her workbook. _Five times twelve is sixty. Three times seven is (seven and seven is fourteen; fourteen and seven is) twenty-one._

A shadow crosses her page. Max leans on the table across from her, where Hopper usually sits. “Does the Chief give you homework even though you’re not in school yet?” asks Max. She scrunches her nose.

Jane shakes her head. “Nancy.”

Max makes a sound, the first huff of a laugh that doesn’t go anywhere. “She would.”

_Nine times six: fifty … fifty-six. Seven times six: forty-two. Twelve times four …_

“Hey, Eleven?” Max’s hand moves across the table a little. 

Jane looks up sharply. “What.”

Max pulls her hand back and leans forwards. “So, my teacher taught me that when you’re multiplying by nine, you can count it on your fingers. Look.” She holds up her hands. “Nine times six, right? One two three four five six.” Max wiggles all of the fingers on one hand, then folds down her thumb. “Sixth finger. Five on the left, Four on the right.” _(Three to the left, four to the right, Jane hears in her mama’s voice)._ “Fifty-four. Not fifty-six.”

Jane counts, tapping on Max’s fingertips. Then she adds the numbers again. She erases the 6 and writes in a 4 in her book. She looks back up at Max. “Do nine times seven.”

Max tucks in her pointing finger on her left hand. “Six on,”--

“Six on the left. Right is three. Sixty-three,” Jane cuts her off.

“Yeah. See, it’s easy.” Max smiles at her.

Max always looks at Jane like she is expecting something from her, even though they aren’t friends. Jane doesn’t know what to do with her: Max made Mike happy when Mike was sad, because Jane wasn’t allowed to be there. Max helped to save Will, again, and that should have been Jane’s job, but she was hiding in the cabin instead, not being stupid.

Max knows what Jane was because Lucas told her, but she doesn’t _know_ how Jane was, when Jane was Eleven. She thinks she’s cool. Not scary, not pretty, not a monster. Cool. Jane remembers the look on her face when they first met, happy to see someone she had never met before. And now she wants to teach Jane how to do math.

Jane doesn’t understand what is going on.

Max’s smile goes away. She puts down her hands. She looks at Jane’s eyes. “Why are you so weird to me?” she asks. She sounds hurt. 

“Weird how?” Jane asks. (Dustin explained this to her. There are different types of weird: good-weird, creepy-weird, science-weird, and Jonathan.)

“Weird like, you straight-up ignored me while we were hiding from the Mind Flayer.” Max pauses. She shuts her eyes. Her skin is very pale. Jane can see her eyes moving underneath her eyelids, like she is dreaming, or remembering. She opens her eyes and looks up, over Jane’s head. “You were mean, and it hurt my feelings, and I want you to be nicer to me because I want you to be my friend.” She recites all of this very quickly. Her cheeks are pink.

Jane stares at her. “Why?”

“Because … I don’t know! You’re awesome. Lucas told me what you did, how you got away from the assholes who locked you up. You’re an _actual mage,_ in real life.” She makes an exploding gesture with her hands. “And you’re the coolest-looking person in this entire hick town,” she says with a grin.

“Not cool. Bitchin’.”

Max laughs. “Seriously. Okay. You’re bitchin’.”

Jane nods. She feels all mixed-up inside, but she doesn’t think she’s angry at Max right now. “Wait,” she says. She looks down and thinks about what she will say for a long time before she speaks. She has to use the right words. She still doesn’t have a lot of words, even with Hopper and Nancy and Joyce and Mike teaching her new ones. She isn’t sure she can make Max understand.

“At school. I saw you with Mike, on your zoomer. You were new. You made him happy.”

“Yeah, for like three seconds.” Max rolls her eyes.

Jane shakes her head. “You didn’t hide and make Mike sad. I was scared. You were with my friends, together. I came back. My friends already had a new new friend who didn’t hurt anyone. Who makes Mike happy again.” Her throat is crowded with more things she wants to say. They are stuck without the words to tell them, like slugs and slime and the nameless things that crawled around the dark Bathtub in her head. “I …” She squeezes her pencil. It is harder to breathe through her nose; not because of blood, because of crying. She sniffs. “I was mad. You weren’t supposed to be here.”

Max sighs. “Tell me about it. I didn’t want to be here, either.”

“No?”

“Not even a little. My mom’s new husband thought we needed a fresh start somewhere far away from my dad.”

“New husband?”

“Yeah. She and my dad got divorced -- they stopped liking each other, so my dad moved to his own house. My mom met Neil and married him.”

There’s something missing in her story. “Your mom likes Neil now?” asks Jane, frowning.

Max shrugs. “I guess so. I don’t know why else she’s with him.”

“Bad man?”

“Not like your Papa, but yeah. Real bad man. I hate him,” says Max. She looks at her hands, not at Jane. Her mouth is flattened in a frown.

Jane nods. “Like your brother?” Lucas told her about him, when they went back to Will’s house and found him there on the floor. Joyce screamed. Steve looked upset then.

“Billy is worse. To me, anyway,” says Max, now.

“Where is your dad?” Jane asks.

“California. It’s … far from here.”

Nancy has taught Jane a little about Geography. Jane knows that the world where she lives is big, bigger than she can imagine. She showed Jane a map of the whole world, round and colorful. Jane can find Hawkins, and she can find Chicago, where Kali lives. They are very close together on the map. “Farther than Chicago?”

“Oh yeah. Way farther. All the way by the ocean.”

“Far,” Jane agrees. 

“Yeah. So, I didn’t even want to be here. And I wasn’t sure about the whole ‘party’ thing, either. But Lucas was cool about it. I wanted his friends to like me, too.”

Jane nods. She understands that. Papa didn’t like the men in white, so it didn’t hurt when he praised her and they hated her. Mike likes being around Lucas, so it had hurt her more when he called her a monster. “So you made Mike happy.”

“Like I said, it was just that one time in the gym. Mostly, he was even weirder than you.”

“Mike is … weird to you?” Jane asks.

“Yeah! You haven’t noticed? I guess he got less weird once you came back, but he was kind of a jerk at first. He really didn’t want me in the party.” Max looks away. She’s smiling, but she looks nervous.

Mike has almost always been nice to Jane, except for when she tried to tell him where Will was. Then he was upset. “Mouth-breather?” she asks, almost afraid of the answer.

Max snorts. “Nah, not that bad.” She tilts her chair back on two legs. She crosses her arms over her chest like she is hugging something invisible close to her body.

Jane leans in. “Friends don’t lie,” she says.

“Fine. A little bit of a mouth-breather.” Max raises her eyebrows and smiles at Jane. “So we’re friends now?”

She had said it without thinking. But Max said she didn’t come here on purpose. She didn’t try to make Jane’s friends forget her. They still missed her. There is room for her here, too. 

Jane looks at Max. Max looks at her. Jane holds out her hand. “Okay,” she says. “Friends.”

“No take-backs.” Max’s hand is still cold as they shake. “So. Board game?”

“Board game,” says Jane.

**Author's Note:**

> Thank you to filiabelialis for the beta read and the title suggestion!
> 
> I wrote the rough draft for this the day after we finished watching Season 2, which was _great_ , but one of the few things I wanted and didn’t get was Eleven and Max actually talking to each other.


End file.
